Here are ten random meditations on Sydney.

1)   The shops open at 9am. Have you ever been in a department store at 9am? It’s quite a displacing sensation. It feels as if you got up to go to the shops rather than getting up and deciding to go to the shops. It’s not right. There are other things that don’t feel right when you’ve just arisen from your nightly slumber such as seeing a jazz band, wearing black tie or eating oysters.

2)   The largest department store in Sydney still has customer announcements: “Good Morning Customers, we have terrific savings in men’s haberdashery today with many named brands 50% off” The old lady making these announcements was persistent, if a little confused as to the correct pronunciation of Hitachi (top marks for retrying on-air though) and I could tell from her delivery she was convinced that blu-ray was a typing error on her script.

3)   Most people in Sydney are employed by the security industry. Not security as in police offices or armored vehicle personnel but “you can’t come in here wearing that” type of security. Bouncers if you will. They are everywhere and at all times of the day – bars, restaurants, store entrances and so on. They are the ever-vigilant protectors of dress code and gaggles of somewhat classless girls. As we all know, their real job is to balance your spending potential with your trouble quotient; we seem to be welcome everywhere.

4)   The girls here are victim to cheap high street fashion. Same problem happens in the UK when all the affordable retail outlets are inundated with cheaply made, “night out with the girls”, trampy partyware. Things are bulging out in the wrong places, seams are crooked and the only decent fit is the one I will have if that girl hitches up her stupid strapless dress over her boobs one more time. Girlfriend, get a better fitting and tasteful outfit or better fitting and tasteful boobs – either appears to be fine in Sydney.

5)   Talking of boobs, topless bathing is quite acceptable on Bondi beach.

6)   Talking of Bondi beach, they have the most fantastic swimming club called the Ice Breakers. The swimming pools are right next to the ocean and the waves occasionally splash into them in a pleasing almost choreographed fashion. The clubhouse juts out from the cliffside, affording amazing views of the whole beach and bay from the ultra-chic top level bar. They serve the general public although the general public rarely goes in because it costs $17 for a gin and tonic. The also serve Pimms. I had two and charged the bill to my expense account. I am Mad Man!

7)   The Australian dollar is taking performance-enhancing drugs. It is so expensive in Sydney that my credit card creaks under the weight of its burden. There are 95 Aussie cents to the US dollar so you might as well call it parity but that’s where the parity ends. I sneeze, it costs $10 and I can’t even expense bodily convulsive explosions. Now, I fully understand that the three of us (Snr. Dir. Biz Dev, VP of Operations and little old me) might only be frequenting the more exclusive of establishments be we secretly know that we’re not even at the second to top tier of Sydney dining. We’re just trying to have a decent meal whilst suffering the hardships of being away from our home and loved ones. If such suffering is only abated after a third bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, then so be it. Oh the humanity of it all.

8)   Hanoi and Sydney are sister cities in traffic madness. There are more cars than road space and just like Hanoi, your right to be on a certain piece of road is governed by the fact you just placed yourself on that certain piece of road. Lots of locals cycle and cycle lanes are ubiquitous. These cyclists are insane, nobody cares for them and they don’t care for themselves. At least in Hanoi the cyclists are in packs of several hundred, there’s safety in those numbers. Here they are the bi-pedal urban kangaroo that bounces out into the middle of the road mesmerized by the oncoming headlights. Some city cars still have ‘roo-bars so ensuring neither marsupial nor bi-cycle will damage the front of your BMW.

9)   Lots of guys in Sydney lift a lot of weights. Big biceps, perfect pecs and a triangular torso stuffed into a skin tight t-shirt. I guess if the beach and the nightclub were your two main social activities, Darwinian theory would say that your chances of mating are higher if you look like you could beat someone up for both ogling your girl and stealing your break. At Sydney’s top nightclub, Hugo’s, I stood wondering if I might have a better chance than the local males because I look completely different than every other guy there. Perhaps some innate and buried desire for genetic diversity would surface and I would be considered suitable breeding material for a passing female. Then I realized the best I could hope for was a vicious mauling from a passing cougar.

10) Population density in Sydney is huge. Seattle is small town America in comparison. Kings Cross on a Saturday night is an overcrowded, oversexed human zoo of mardi gras proportions. The Manley Ferry on a Sunday afternoon is equally as chunky although it’s the under fives feeling queasy rather than the under twenty fives. Chinatown smells and old Asian ladies push washing machines across busy intersections. This is exactly what a Chinatown should be. The gay district, Darlinghurst, is just plain nasty.  That too, is exactly how it should be. I don’t believe reflex anal dilatatio (look it up) should feel at home in the gentrified, commoditized and commercialized gay neighborhoods of the Passive Northwest. Every city street at any time seems to be teeming with life darting in opposing directions but moving in concert. Sydney is the great barrier reef of urban existence.

So, my time here comes to a close. My plastic camera is not a reliable source of documentation. Its temperamental and inconsistent nature yet again leaves the words on this blog as the sole journal. Most of these meditations were made under the influence of less than wholesome stimuli and I must give credit to my colleagues who may either have planted the seed of my acerbic commentary or spoke the original nuggets of comedic observation that I may have plagiarized for this essay. If nothing else, I owe much to one of them for ordering yet another round of drinks and more to the other for signing my expense report “no questions asked” – I hope.

Consider the value of a dollar. Now consider ten thousand of them. The distance between Vancouver, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand is eleven thousand kilometers. I’m going to round that down to ten thousand kilometers because I’m an international business bigwig to whom one thousand anythings is just a mere rounding error. Here’s some math:

$10,000 / 10,000km = $1 per km

I’ll leave you with that for a moment.

I’m on an airplane heading back to New Zealand. My traveling companion with whom (twice in two paragraphs) I have sat, either window or aisle, for so many miles is not here. Although my travelling muse is missing, that’s not a bad thing for our bank account considering the dollar figure I just left you with. Unlike the last trip out, there are no stolen vacations, no working the system, just business. Dollars are dollars regardless of USD, NZD or AUD. So business it is and in business I am in.

I flew trans-continental business class once before, many years ago, when I was just a young whippersnapper of a worker. A freebie from American (or United, or Continental Airlines, I can’t remember who) to build loyalty to their newly opened route from Portland to Heathrow. I was too young to appreciate it and equally too hungover to enjoy it. Now, with probably one hundred thousand air miles travelled, although mysteriously not accumulated, I get to fly business class again.

My seat reclines and then folds like an oversized origami swan, to a fully horizontal position with the touch of a button. I can do this whenever I want because in my class of travel I appear to be immune to FAA regulations and can take off at the same inclination as the plane if I wish. My TV is on an armature that pivots, pitches and yaws to the ultimate viewing angle and my stewardess ensures that at any given moment my wine glass is full and its bounty never obstructs my multi-articulated movie watching. I shall call her my stewardess not because of sexism but because of classicism. As I type, my neighbors, who I take to be an semi-elderly couple on a big splurge, have left to brush their teeth (and not to be members of the mile-high club I hope) and in their absence our stewardess has made their bed with fresh linens. That, my readers, is class. It’s class in the same way the leaving for the restroom at El Gaucho ensures a folded napkin on your seat upon your return.

I have a wine menu highlighting great New Zealand wines and a choice of entrees devised by the three top chefs in the whole of New Zealand. Champagne awaited my embarkation although I chose orange juice (from concentrate – strike one against business class) – a more sensible choice forced upon me by two rather hurried pints of beer in the bar before boarding. A four-course dinner followed, served with a tablecloth, napkin and warm artisan bread accompanied by olive oil in a small plastic bottle not unlike the small bottles of shampoo given to you in hotel bathrooms. My entrée was of restaurant quality albeit a mini-me version. Quite sensible as it turns out because in business class we don’t fart, nor do we wish to battle the urge brought on by excessive eating. [Although, as I type this, we do apparently snore] I was even offered desert wine, a luxury I have yet to appreciate but then I’m not quite forty. Disappointingly, in the modern airline industry paranoia trumps luxury and although forks and spoons were silverware, my knife was plastic. It was the runt of my flatware litter. Despite the obvious attention to detail, certain parts of the service still had that slightly chilled feel as if it had been sitting in carts in the cold store waiting for the aircraft. It’s a bizarre tactile thing, your fork is a little colder than forks normally are or the body of the glass has a chill that is leaching its way into the red wine. I don’t mean to grumble though.

I watched a movie – you get nicer headphones in business class too. I went to bed – but not before I brushed my teeth, indicating to my stewardess, in a non-verbal and subtle manner that befits my class, that I wish my bed to be made. Upon my fresh mouthed return I discovered that either my subtlety was missed or my fraudulent pretense at being upper class was discovered because my bed was still a seat and my linens nowhere to be seen. I had to do the walk of shame past the few rows of economy class to find my stewardess and ask for my bed to be created. Very humiliating. I then went to sleep, which I did until sort of didn’t, then couldn’t, then could until I shouldn’t in case I missed the gastro thrill of business class breakfast. The bed serves as a metaphor for flying business class in general: despite the linens and mini duvet thing, you’re still only lying on a stiff aircraft seat.

Back to basic math:

10,000km / $10,000 = pretty spendy.

The Queen Mary II is substantially cheaper and you get six days of business class. However, flying business does take up one whole row of seats and it is about 3 times the price of a regular, full price economy ticket. I would never spend $10K of my own money so I’m not sure how my unethical brain won out over the normally incorruptible dominant side. But if the inventory of my life’s moral dilemmas contains only the distant feeling of guilt from spending $10,000 of my employers’ billion dollar revenues then I would have cause to celebrate upon my expiration. (Those keen observers of human psychology will have just noted my ham-fisted justification of this morally dubious act as just a mere delay tactic in the hope it will probably all come out in the wash at the moment when I am actually forced to reconcile my life’s actions)

Assessing the merits of such an excessive travel experience is an interesting mathematical equation that probably looks a little like this:

Ticket $ * need / entitlement * (sense there of)

—————————————————————–         *  angle of seat recline

wine * chanpagne / (orange juice – from concentrate)

Here some more complex math, a formula that even our best mathematicians can’t solve:

life = 1

I have a suntan. I also haven’t shaved for nearly two weeks. Both feel good although the former didn’t feel quite so good at first and the latter is starting to itch so probably won’t feel quite so good for much longer. We leave tomorrow. No doubt my skin is looking forward to that more than the rest of my body. I can hear and see the surf from our little caravan situated in the garden of the hostel we’re staying at in Opotiki. Our friends from Seattle, Kurt and Lisa have joined us. They are on the start of a seven month sabbatical in NZ and coincidences in this small world being what they insist on being, we were able to meet up and enjoy a few days together. They are settling in well to their new adventure and I have stopped baby-sitting them. They didn’t really need me to do that but I can’t help myself. I’m always meddling in other people’s ability to think for themselves.

I think K&L are quite bonkers. I think they think the same. Currently, in a dog pound in the quarantined section of Auckland sits not only their Australian Sheppard, Ransom but their rather aging mixed-meat kitty cat Gracie. In just a few days Scooby Doo will come to life when their little Toyota Town-Ace van becomes the Mystery Machine and Kurt (Shaggy), Lisa (Daphine), Ransom (Scooby) and Gracie (Thelma) head around the North Island to be those meddling kids. Hannah Barbera always implied that Scooby was perfectly house trained, could probably use a bidet and prefers Charmain softness to toilet paper made from a recycled paper product. K&L have to find somewhere in the van to put a litter tray and Gracie has to learn to poop at 100km/h on winding country roads. She’ll have a month in which to master this new skill before they settle in Nelson but in the meantime all four of them will be living out of and sleeping in the van/litter tray. Much hilarity is sure to ensue.

In my last piece I bemoaned the fine sport of surfing. Today I sea-kayaked which is somewhat like surfing only more comfortable. One sits in a special kayak and paddles out through the surf to the quieter waters. Turn the thing around, paddle hard and ride the wave all the way to a shuddering halt on the sand. It’s terrific fun but mainly because little effort is really involved and sitting in the calm waters is reminiscent of taking to a rowboat on a lake whilst sipping a fine chardonnay. I did tip over a few times though so best not take out the fine crystal.

New Zealand sounds idyllic I know, but it is not without its cultural struggles. As you may know, the semi-native Maori have done better than most indigenous peoples in wresting equality and some semblance of their culture back from The Crown. Pocket battles still rage however, especially in the renaming of towns from the anglicized versions given to them in the late 1800’s. In Maori, most towns that have a “W” in their name are spelled with a “Wh” and pronounced “fha”. Apparently the Victorians had a problem with this and either took the “h” away or stubbornly refused to change their pronunciation from a hard “W”.  All this useless information only serves to make the following anecdote barely understandable and whether it is at all amusing remains to be seen:

So, there we were, in the car, tuning into the local (they are all local) radio station when the news report broke into the somewhat sporadic music selection to announce that the town council of W(h)anga-something-or-other had just reached a long awaited and long fought for decision on the correct cultural spelling of their town.

[Cut to news reader]:

“John Smith, chairman of the town council said this was the hard decision he has ever had to make.”

[Cut to field recording of John Smith, chairman of the town council]:

“This was the hardest decision I have ever had to make.”

[Cut back to news reader]

And the verdict? They have decided that the town of W(h)anga-something-or-other can be officially spelled Wanga-something-or-other or Whanga-something-or-other.

This story illustrates two main facets of global travel. Firstly, cultural imperialism is hard to quash. Because the British got their far reaching fingers on these small islands first means the British trait of reiterating the bloody obvious only to come to a decision that placates everybody and pleases nobody instead of leaving the status quo that at least pleased somebody, prevailed. We should, however, be content with that minor quibble for when America’s cultural empire crumbles the world will be left only with a global obesity of bad food, guns, violence and reality television.

Oh yes – the second facet of global travel – local news stories are hard to transcribe into blog entries without boring your reader.

For me there is one travel event that says “I’m heading home” and that’s the reading of the Skymall catalog. I just finished my last perusal for a while as we jet back to Jet City. Could I resist the urge to purchase a palm reading device that promoted itself as “the latest in ancient technology”, a team logo’d football helmet for my dog and any number of devices that would secretly record my business meetings via video enabled sunglasses, pens and paperweights? (Question: does anyone still use a paperweight – when was the last time someone in your office opened a window and your carefully arranged stack of memorandums took flight from a freak gust of wind?) Skymall represents America in all its gory glory. The excess, the commercialism, the innovation,  the snake-oil, the entrepreneurial drive and the utter uselessness of most things in our life. When I travel, if people should ask me what America is really like I say it’s just like you see in the movies and every stereotype you hear about is true. If you stop to consider the breadth of the American movie experience from indie flicks to major productions and the range of every American you know from cab drivers to gun-toting freaks you realize that America is a stylized, hyper-realized pastiche of itself and everything it exports in its popular culture is true. New Zealand is not that. It is many things but not as many things. It is neither better nor worse, just different. I will tire of America one day and when I do, I’ll live somewhere else and that’s when I’ll stop reading the Skymall catalog.

There you have it. Another 10,000 miles flown and several thousand biased words written on the world in general. Thanks for flying with us – we realize you have a choice and we appreciated your patronage but please remember that your nearest emergency exit may be behind you.

It’s been too long since my fingers put those two words and one punctuation character together. This is a macro blog of a micro trip. But we are back. Back on the road, back in hostels and back in New Zealand. Things are different. Not NZ, that appears to be pretty much intact. But we’re different – circumstances are different. For the record, for posterity and to clear the air of any pretense, I’m here in NZ sucking on the teat of corporate America; sent down under (almost) to sell my company’s wares to corporate New Zealand. In return for the subsidized pleasures of an industrialized road warrior, I/we get a subsidized vacation back to a country we love. I refuse to bore you with the economics of this trip – suffice to say that it actually saved us no money at all but rather financed a luxury beyond a point we would have spent anyway. A last minute plane ticket for Sarah equals the price of two reasonably advanced bookings and three nights of expense account excesses in a major metropolitan city would have been beyond the depth of my wallet or indeed, the willingness of my thrifty fingers to delve in anywhere near to it. To atone for these sins, I sit writing this in our sparse, non-en-suite room in the Raglan Backpacker’s Hostel (albeit on a rather nice MacBook Pro).

Back to business. And business it was. Our potential customer was nice enough. Business like, formal, professional and quite insistent their million or so dollars be well spent. I reciprocated with being equally as business like (I did not put my feet upon the conference room table as I am want to do at home), formal (I wore a suit and tie when nobody else did), professional (I resisted the urge to be 100% honest 100% of the time) whilst gamely trying to convince them I was the kind of guy you would want to give a million or so dollars to. As a sidebar, it’s not actually my job to do the aforementioned as I live behind the perma-shield of being a technician – eccentric semi-genius and utterly incapable of understanding the value of dollar. However, I am but a man. By 2pm on the final day of meetings I started to watch the clock. Talk about SLA’s, PDA’s and TLA’s irritated my ear drums and my eyes stung from excessive dry marker usage in the desperate attempts to characterize technically complex concepts with irregularly drawn red boxes connected via wobbly green lines. It was time to go.

We rented a car. It was cheap – It is crap. Last time here we did the same thing. We’ve grown up and so has our cheapy rental. It has electric windows and a/c. Both appear to be working. It drifts to the left on roads. This could be because it’s old and has done many tired budget miles or it could also do it because it knows I don’t drive on the left as often I used to. Actually, the rental company probably alters the vehicle to drift left especially for their American customers. I paid an extra $10 a day for CDW – I’m getting old and worrisome.

We’re in Raglan – I mentioned that before I know but Raglan is a small surfing town that attracts the kind of backpacker that come for a weekend and stay all summer. We are not kids anymore, neither are we backpackers. This is a vacation away from what we are as much as what we do. They are young and I have grey hair. They are noisy in their bravado and surf bragging and I hope they will calm down before bedtime. I used to be them – I miss it sometimes. I thank them for letting me stay at their hostel for a few nights.

Although we may not necessarily belong here, we do belong everywhere. We both love the road, it doesn’t matter the budget especially when we are safe in knowledge that all hardships are temporary. Bourgeois backpackers – that’s us. I don’t care – I’ve been to more places than most and I’ve been doing this since I was 18 years old. I don’t have a lot to prove anymore except to myself. My inability to sit still whilst buying an expensive and somewhat stationary house proves I obviously am not at peace with my wanderlust. I am terrible at being honest with myself. I don’t even think that statement was necessarily true, that’s how bad I am at it.

A girl checked into the hostel after us yesterday. She was concerned about the $3 discrepancy between her Lonely Planet write-up and the actual cost of a bed in a shared room. We spent $30 on pizza last night. We are both in agreement that traveling with some money is better. Having said all that, just being with fellow travelers is rejuvenating even if we have little in common being both old and on regular vacation. I can’t be bothered to offer my bona-fides: “Yeah, we did 57,000 miles over ’07 and ‘08” sounds so pretentious.

New Zealand is beautiful. Astoundingly so. Still.

I don’t like to backtrack. I refuse to visit somewhere more than once because the world is big and our time on it is very small. The world is small and our impact on it is very big. Think about that too. Go book a plane ticket to somewhere strange but don’t forget to offset your carbon footprint.  I’m very happy to be back here. Nostalgia is a feeling I don’t have much time for in my grinchy heart but I am nostalgic for NZ. We were such greenbacks even though we had more miles under our belt then than most (there I go again with the pretention). India really is the traveler’s fulcrum point – nothing is the same after that. Travelling usually involves a constant level of stress. Even in the most westernized of places, busses must be caught, hostel rooms booked and possessions safeguarded. My lack of that feeling is a little strange to me and probably means the car will breakdown or somebody will steal my yuppie MacBook.

Even stranger is my writing this blog. As you have no doubt realized, I don’t really have anything to say. Tales of our adventurous antics (we borrowed a couple of bikes today and cycled to the beach) sound positively mundane and keen observations of local customs (the shops close generally between 4.30pm and 5pm, although one or two will stay open as late as 6pm) are somewhat moribund. Christmas, however, is quite bizarre in the sun. It’s not very festive but then I’ve been hyper-commercialized by Thanksgiving appearing to start before Halloween and Christmas following a mere six hours after that. Perhaps this is how they do it in normal places around the world. I read the local Raglan newspaper today (published weekly, eight pages, large font).  In their op-ed feature, a local writer opined on the loss of niceness at Christmas by shop staff and shoppers alike. He proposes we call it Nicemas. He was entirely Grinch-like in his berating of this country’s commercial approach to Christmas. He was really quite scathing in tone and word and not at all the person I would elect to be the founder of Nicemas. In other news, eight middle aged couples learned to dance to rock’n’roll music, efficiently and enjoyably taught by a former resident who has just moved back after 20 years of being away (previous place of residence unlisted but the reader was left to assume it was a large city – perhaps Hamilton, 60km up the road).

I wish I could surf. It looks fun for all of 25 seconds. The rest of it seems like an aquatic nightmare. This town is big for surfing due to its, well, big surf. It was also featured in a seminal surf movie from the 1960’s called An Endless Summer. To Raglan’s credit, I haven’t seen one t-shirt emblazoned with the movie’s logo. In Urban Outfitters on Broadway in Seattle they recently received another large shipment of light blue T’s sporting such logo. That’s ironic. The ocean was cold today. That’s reason 23 why I won’t surf. I wish I could though but I’m just not that kind of guy. Even if I could physically do it, there’s something about the culture that I intrinsically wouldn’t be able to grasp. I would always be like the little guy on Fantasy Island, forever in the company of strapping, good looking perfect specimens of youth that say the right things and make the right moves. I have never been particularly cool and surfing would act as a constant reminder of my high school era insistence that Buddy Holly was the best music I ever heard whilst my schoolmates were listening to Duran Duran and INXS.

On a related note – I brought the all-plastic Diana camera with me again on these travels. It captures the world beautifully. It reminds me that my own observations are just as inaccurate, soft around the edges, light streaked and imperfect. I think I look cool using that camera but I probably look like Buddy Holly. Several people have stopped to ask me about it but my explanation falls on befuddled ears. We live in a digital age – analogue crappiness has been supplanted by the iPhone (which also produces crappy images but on a different level). I would love to post images and show you what I’ve been photographing but I have to wait until I get home, get down to the lab, have the film processed, scan the negative, crop, color correct, post-process and upload. By then you won’t care anymore – oh well.

New Zealand smells great. There’s humidity in the air that catches the miniscule smells emanating from the leaves of the sub-tropical fauna and is pushed along by an insistent salt-laden ocean breeze. It’s great for the sinuses. Fruit and vegetables also taste better and they appear to be cheaper. Makes you wonder how such a small country can produce so and the mighty America still pulls its chicken apart with machines. Dining out is EXPENSIVE with small portions yet high quality. That’s another blow to these here American psyches – we just don’t deal well with that concept. We should learn to. It would be better for all concerned. Restaurant service has generally not improved since our last trip. We have been the willing recipients of two separate rounds of free beers due to service inadequacies beyond our control. Perhaps I should start a restaurant exchange program like they have for school children – the Kiwi cooks could show the Americans how to produce perfectly balanced and portion controlled meals whilst the Americans could show the Kiwis how to take a simple fucking order. I joke. The expletive was uncalled for. I’m sorry for that but I respectfully refuse to use the backspace key.

I suppose that’s enough for now. I’m not sure why I’m writing this. My audience is long gone since our last world tour and I certainly don’t do this for any cathartic reasons. I’ll probably post this up on the blog, feel satisfied for five minutes and then casually but intentionally email my friends and family that it’s there. Or, I’ll probably have Sarah post it on her Facebook page. She has more friends than I do and they care about what she does. I could even tweet this monster but it would probably bring down the twittersphere with its girthy and gritty realism. However you have just digested this, please be kind and remember that I crave your attention and accolades.

Kia Ora,

Dave

(Kia Ora means hello – I’ve no idea what goodbye is)

I suspect that I will not be the lone voice in the blogsphere this week. Tomorrow stands as a great test of many people, one person and approximately the whole internet. As the great empowerer (I literally reference the internet and figuratively the president-elect), thousands of people will flood its being with the thoughtful and the thoughtless. I write this on Monday January 19th 2009 for no other reason than should tomorrow the internet crumble under the weight of the inane, insane and inspired, my ramblings will have made it out there as a monument to nothing but my own musings.

My daily observation, (a resolution I made at the beginning of the year along with my desire to decrease my dogged overuse of parenthesizes to communicate a side thought) was marshaled from two segments of seemingly unconnected radio both over employing either the preposition or the concept of the word “like”. The first radio report was an interesting, if not slightly over patriotic piece on NPR: a compilation of inaugural speech snippets from President Coolidge to President G.W. Bush. Each president was telling the expectant masses they are great but could be greater and each, even the last, sounded inspiring and confident. However, the hidden subtext to these sermons from the political pulpit was the desire of each new president to be ‘like’ a predecessor. Quote: as Jefferson said, as Lincoln said, as Roosevelt said, as Kennedy said and, surprisingly, as Reagan said are all really to be interpreted as ‘As I Said’.  It is fair to say we all wish Obama to be ‘like’ these presidents also. If you take a bushel of American presidents and thrash out the chaff, you are left with a great man. It is not that we wish Obama to be ‘like’ this great man, we insist he actually become it. Nothing less will suffice and nothing more can be achieved. Obama is about to become America, a metamorphosis that even the most of American of presidents, George Washington, could not achieve. Washington was elected by the small self-appointed American Congress before there was even a government to speak of, to lead a population of mostly illiterate peasants – the unwashed masses. His greatness of office was mainly defined by just being George Washington. Obama’s greatness of office has already occurred: he is the first African American president. He must do more than be ‘like’ his heroes, he must be a hero if he is to eclipse that greatness already achieved.

Obama’s success under the burden of this crushing expectation is overwhelmingly dependent on us, the now washed but not much more literate masses. Whether we, as a nation and as individuals can live up to the challenge Obama will lay down before us tomorrow is the question at hand. If Obama is about to become America, can we become Obama? Currently, patriotic fervor is gently smoothing our collective hair, soothingly reassuring us that great leaders, therefore a great nation and subsequent great wealth have historically risen from the ashes of civil war, civil rights and civil bread lines. There exists a danger of complacency that we need do no more than wave a flag and remember a sound bite of tomorrow’s historical rhetoric to make the bogyman go away and leave our dreams once again fluffy and wholly (or perhaps holy) American. What are the tools required to make America great? They used to be, literally tools: hammers, dynamite, pickaxes of the pioneering west,  rivet guns skillfully wielded by Rosie and the auto-giants of Detroit. But now there is a new world order. Now manual labor is going to tomorrow’s Americas, the pioneers of the East, and they are hungry and desperate for what we have. What a wonderful job this nation of illiterate sharecroppers, slaves and economic refugees has done to empower itself but, I fear,  it may only have become a nation of illiterate ex-sharecroppers, ex-slaves and ex-economic refugees. Our tool is our educated intelligence and our application of it.

And so, ‘like’, what was I ‘like’ saying when ‘like’ I started this whole thing? It was, indeed the overpowering and underwhelming use of the word ‘like’. Shortly following the Inaugural Greatest Hits, my local NPR affiliate ran a regional magazine program written by and for the people. Not ‘we the people’ but ‘them the people’: the young, the teens, the future leaders of this great nation. I am generally a supporter of the youth. I teach them for free, I have faith in them and I try not to pass judgement on the pants that are hanging to the point of their embarrassment or the skirts that are short to the point of mine. Yet, young people have razor sharp minds, never forget that. And this show, for the first ten minutes was a testament to that. The presenter’s drive and ambition to one day follow the soothing yet informative formula of National Public Radio was wonderful. She was undoubtedly white, she explained she was a product of affluent home-schooling and she will, in my mind at least, move on to great things, a natural leader among (wo)men.

In contrast, her feature story was reported by a fellow teen from California and was an account of how he, not only an economically deprived teenager but a graffiti artist and a black one to boot, would interview Newt Gingrich at Newt’s house during an evening of caviar and silver plated ginger beer service (he is underage, remember). It is not, however, the almost farcical nature of this meeting of the minds that makes me cringe but, during the interview segment with Gingrich, the absolute and terrible way in which he represented the ‘youth of America’. Now, Newt is hardly the most liberal and progressive of extremely wealthy, late aged white male Republicans who once was the third most powerful man in America, but, quite frankly, his prescription of draconian discipline and the abandonment of adolescence as a word, social demographic and even age group, seemed quite reasonable when faced with the uneducated representation of our future that sat before him. Most objectionable was the constant use of the word ‘like’ as verb, noun, pronoun, conjunction, and adverb. Dialects and colloquialisms I am, as they say, “down with” but there must be more than just MTV thought backing them and more than one word illustrating them. We are ready to blame our education system but first we should blame ourselves. If we don’t, like, educate them that they need their educating, like, by setting super cool examples then we ain’t got nuffin’ but, like, well, kinda this to, like, look forward to and that would, like, be super-bad, know what I’m sayin’? I’m not sure where the buck stops but if it didn’t occur to either the boys’ parents, the anchor of the show or the NPR executives that he needed to be a little sharper both mentally and linguistically then we are all headed for the twitters of the world.

We should take a moment to ask ourselves what kind of president we want in the future because these teens on NPR may well be the microcosm of our choice.  Obama not only raises the bar higher but sets an entirely new level of achievement. His oratory skills are masterful and his ability to sound presidential long predated even the primaries. Excepting any of those skills, our young black reporter has much in common with our young black president, namely poverty, race and a desire to be heard. He should be presidential material. This is the dichotomy moving forward. Do we wish our future leaders to be ‘like’ Obama from poor, humble beginnings filled with spirit, ethnicity, intelligence and inspiration or should we continue to pluck our leaders from the safe, measured, over-achieving homogeneous establishment illustrated by the poor teenage female presenter on NPR? (To whom I apologize for having just turned into a pant-suited, pearl sporting WASP for exaggerated purposes of contrast and comparison.) President Obama is asking us to help ourselves so I respectfully suggest we start by increasing the vocabulary of tomorrow’s potential leaders beyond a single preposition. Let us all strive to be a little more ‘like’ President Obama’s ideal and a little less like, well, know you, like totally awesome!

And so, first, an apology. What a way to leave our loyal readers. After all we’ve been through together, the ups and downs, highs and lows, ins and outs and I (we) leave you hanging somewhere in New Jersey lamenting dead relatives. That was not the way we intended to honor you and for that we beg your forgiveness. There is/was a method to the madness however. I wanted the last entry in this travel collective to be the denouement, drawing together the sights and smells of our adventures into a neat little package with a pretty bow on top. But this task caused great consternation and ultimately frustrated failure. Perhaps you could draw your own conclusions but, apart from that being disrespectful to you, we just didn’t think you could do it. It’s not that we underestimate your capacity for understanding and reason, it is that we have come to note that our travels are just too big for encapsulation. We have not come to terms with the shear width and breadth of them ourselves yet, so to expect our family, friends and casual voyeurs to formulate a precis of our voyages goes beyond the reasonable. Nevertheless, we live in a summarized society so, with apologies proffered but no retractions offered, here is the superlative list we all crave:

1) Distance traveled: 96,180km/59,764 miles
2) Continuous overland distance traveled without flying: 30,979km/19,250 miles
3) Highest elevation gained on foot: 4610m/15,124ft
4) Lowest elevation gained by swimming: 24m/78.74ft
5) Number of countries visited longer than one night: 23
6) Number of photo’s taken (and kept): 5137
7) Number of words written on our blog concerning these adventures: 104,544

And so on… and on… and on some more after that. Oh, but what a let down. The summary of the whole two years into bullet points loses its heart and soul. 5137 pictures – how boring. Would you want to sit through them all? Nope, me neither. What does a mile mean? A Nepal mile is a lot different than a USA mile. No, my friends, the reason why this last entry has been so long coming is that I’m quite literally unable to write it. It’s not emotion, although there has been plenty of that around here just lately, it’s just a complete inability to form my thoughts into words.

Today, I decided to take the plunge. This is my last day ‘off’ before returning to work, before returning to the normality in which we all exist. It has been slowly creeping back yet has not been wholly unwelcome. Some shopping, some decorating of the condo, a cat, a car and a regular Christmas have all made successful inroads to my road-hardened heart. But now, on the eve of being served the largest slice of normality pie (a la mode), I decided that enough was enough and this last entry must be written.

And here it is:

It still doesn’t say anything. I still can’t do it. Good grief David Browne. Here’s some random brainstorming formatted into a list, perhaps you can make sense of something:

• • So that is what Mongolia looks like.
  • Sarah rocks the world and puts all naysayers who ever said anything condescending or disparaging about her ability to do this, to shame. I am proud of her and you should be too.
  • I miss it.
  • I don’t miss it.
  • I have a lot of photos and a bunch of them I’m really quite proud of.
  • We wrote a lot of words and we’re proud of them too.
  • The world is generally poor.
  • The world is generally happy.
  • The USA is generally the inverse of the last two statements.
  • The USA is truly great but not because of the previous statement.
  • My understanding of the world is inversely proportional to my knowledge of it.
  • Will I ever do this again?
  • Technology reaches everywhere and everywhere people’s lives are better for it.
  • The developing world’s food is wonderful, yet its wine leaves a lot to be desired.
  • Seattle’s ethnic restaurants are really quite authentic in everything but price.
  • Souvenirs are overrated.
  • Merrell make the best trail shoes in the world.
  • Never take clean drinking water for granted.
  • Squatting to use the toilet really clears things out.
  • We need to allow goats on our public buses, it lends the whole operation a sense of community.
  • Sacrificing goats in front of a 737 should be recognised by Boeing as an official maintenance procedure.
  • China is not at all scary.
  • Russia is.
  • I Am-sterdam.
  • Amsterbeth is Amsterdam.

So there we are my dear friends and family. The night before it all comes to an end. I can’t help but feel a sense of foreboding. Is this it? Is this Pee Wee’s Big Adventure? Sure, we’ll take vacations to the weird and wonderful but a vacation, as we have discussed, has different goals than those of extended travel. I have traveled my entire life, big travels too, but I’m nearly (almost, sort-of) forty. Is this the part in the movie where I settle down, get a Golden Retriever and wait for the urge to buy a two seater sports car to kick in? I don’t know and neither do you and that’s part of the adventure too I suppose.

Nah – you know, from that last paragraph to this I’ve made up my mind. Fuck it! Life’s too short to hang around waiting for Death to come around with the check and in his over-familiar way say, “I’ll be your cashier when you’re ready. No rush, take your time.” (Liar!) Dine and dash, my friends, dine and dash.

The Acceptance Speech
Wow, we don’t know what to say, We’re flabbergasted. Firstly, we’d like to thank the academy for voting us the recipients of the Dave and Sarah Travel Award for 2007/2008 but we couldn’t have done it without the following people:

Nancy – For the being the post office, business manager and car rental agency.
Jackie & Ken – For giving me back my bedroom for probably way too long. It’s nice to know the feeling of sharing a bed with a girl whilst in my parent’s house still feels the same.
Amsterbeth – Hey, what else needs to be said?
Nina, Steve, Beth & Graham – The UK taxi service and proprietors of the best Bed and Breakfast in Lightwater, Wokingham and Padstow.
Amber and Chadwick – Buddy Holly Lives!
Hugo – My best photographs are all because this crazy Dutchman stubbornly refuses to use a digital camera.
Rachael Evans – Bring it on, we’re not scared anymore.
Patti & Leslie – We didn’t completely mess it up. That makes us very happy.

My paternal grandfather was a huge Hungarian man whose skin turned a deep leather red in the summer. He had a deep, bellowing laugh and was the life and fun of every party. He would yell out “Buffongoola” and called his mates “Mongolian porkchops” – whatever any of that meant. Everyone knew and loved Al, he was extremely popular in the Hungarian and eastern European communities of New Brunswick, New Jersey and was one of the boys in clubs like the Eagles and Knights of Columbus. He was an extremely hard worker, was smart with his money and provided well for his family. My grandparents had a little bungalow on the Jersey shore where I spent all my summers growing up. Their back patio was the best patio of all because the party was always happening there. Beers were always in the cooler, something was always on the grill and at the center of it all was my grandfather.

Unfortunately, he also had a mean and angry drinking problem, was an abusive father, probably a distant husband and, when there wasn’t a party going on, generally instilled a paralytic fear in me. He yelled at me once for something silly and I literally peed my pants right there on the kitchen floor. Our interactions from the time I was five mainly consisted of talking about the weather. During those summers down the shore when I was little, he would walk me to the post office once every couple weeks to mail a postcard home. Once I was old enough to walk myself, he didn’t really know what to do with me anymore and we tended to just avoid each other for most of the season.

He had quadruple bypass surgery in the fall of 1991. Though the surgery itself was a success, there was a mishap in the recovery room and he never regained consciousness. He died on December 12th of that year. I can’t say I ever missed him after he died. Some of my happiest memories are from my summers down the shore but also some of my very worst and most scary memories are of his traumatic drunken episodes. To be frightfully honest, my life was a little more peaceful after he died. For reasons too complicated to explain here, my parents and I did not attend his funeral. My grandmother moved down to Louisiana to be near us and from there on, I had no reason to visit New Jersey anymore and didn’t give thought to ever visiting his grave.

That was 16 years ago, though, and many things have changed since then. My grandmother has now passed away, my relationship with my father has grown distant and my connection to the entire rest of my father’s family has, for all intents and purposes, ceased. The disintegration of family ties began when I was a child and was out of my control but making peace for myself is totally in my control and as the years have gone by, the more I have yearned for it. When David and I began planning our road trip across America I felt a strong pull to finally make the trip to my grandfather’s cemetery, to stand where my grandmother had stood and also as a grown woman, say goodbye and let it all go.

My mom made some calls for me and was able to find the cemetery name and address and my grandfather’s plot details. I had butterflies in my stomach as we drove into the old neighborhood. First we drove past the house my grandfather built and my father was raised in. Then, as we drove on to the cemetery, I thought back to how my grandmother had described to me the grand procession that took place on the day of the funeral – hundreds of cars, mourners from all reaches of the huge Hungarian community. I expected the cemetery, then, to be beautiful, perhaps with a tree lined entrance, manicured grounds, even regal looking. In reality, the grass under the blazing sun was as parched and tired as the few oldies shuffling through the headstones. Everything, the paved paths, the grass and headstones, the chain-link fence and even the visitors that day, all looked like they had had their day and were all now a little forgotten.

We set out to find St. Joseph’s section but quickly realized that none of the sections were actually labeled, they simply blended one into the other and we’d arrived on a weekend so there was no grounds’ keeper to assist us. Determined not to have made the trip in vain, we began walking the rows, starting in the newer looking sections and making our way to the old. We spent probably two hours in the blistering sun and I grew so desperate I began saying out loud, to who I have no idea, “I’m trying to do the right thing here. Please don’t let us leave without finding this …”.

Finally, I walked over to an elderly man tending to a grave to ask if he knew where St. Joseph’s section was. He was probably in his 80’s, small in stature, a little bent over, cute in his oldness. He didn’t know where the section was but began explaining how just about everyone he knew, most of his family and friends, were buried in this cemetery and he came regularly to visit them all. It took him a couple of hours to get to each grave. He seemed a little lonely and talkative, a dangerous combination in the burning sun and as I shifted from one foot to the other wondering when it would be polite to excuse myself and consider my search sadly over, he happened to ask the name of the person I was looking for. I told him my grandfather’s name and instantly I could see something sparking in his memory. It was like I was taking him back to a better time, I could almost here the music begin to play in a dance hall from George’s past. It turned out this very nice man, George Soborvak, not only knew my grandfather but knew my great uncle, my great grandmother, my entire family. He remembered the bar that my family had owned, he was in the Eagles with my grandfather and his brother, “the boys” he called them. “Big fella, that Al”…..”what’s the name again?” Poor George remembered so much from so many years ago but had to be reminded of the name I was looking for once very 10 seconds or so. George felt terrible that he couldn’t help me, perhaps he’d not been to the funeral or maybe he’s been to too many others since then to remember where this one grave might be. He felt certain, though, that another “boy” from the group would be able to help- Greg somebody, who was actually Hungarian (George was Czech) and two years younger so was bound to remember better. Though George mentioned several times that he needed to get home or “the missus” would be angry, he insisted on driving by Greg’s place to seek help and off he went. I stood stunned by this chance meeting. George was more a connection to my family and to my past than seeing a headstone would ever have been. He had been standing next to me in the flesh, remembering and speaking names and places that I never expected to hear spoken out-loud again. He was proof, a wonderful reminder that my family had held a place in the community and that there had been good times. I smiled at the thought of George excitedly sharing at the next Eagles’ meeting that he’d met Al Lukacs’ granddaughter. “Remember Al? Man, we had good times with him. We haven’t thought about him in a while…” That the memory of my grandfather would bring a few minutes of good times for a group of old boys would make me happy if I had any confidence that George would remember our encounter long enough to tell someone about it. But what was more important to me that day was that George, in his sweet and tender way, seemed more a grandfather than my own had been. In that way, he allowed the memory of my grandfather to bring ME some good times for a few minutes.

George came back to say that Greg had not been home. I still haven’t seen my grandfather’s grave but now it doesn’t matter. The grave represents his death whereas George represents his life, a much more fitting tribute than a cold lump of granite.

Consider this: the United States of America is a giant restaurant bill. You know, the piece of paper the server puts face down on your table at the end of your meal, and as she does so she performs that neat little trick where she puts a crease along the middle of the bill so it has a handy little ridge by which to pick it up. Am making any sense here?

The crease is the Rocky Mountains, they run from Canada down to New Mexico, creating a continental sized ridge that would be quite handy if some trans-dimensional being needed to pick up the USA to see what’s underneath. OK, that’s too much symbolism. Or is it? You see, I never thought the Rockies would be very symbolic to me. In fact, I didn’t really know where they were. I mean, I know where they are but just like any great natural marvel, you might know where it is from a book but you never can really know until you’ve been there. The symbolism of this whole g’damn trip slapped me in the face at 11,312 feet above sea level as the little red Santa Fe, despite a V6 engine, was huffing and puffing up the side of a mountain. There, at the top of Monarch Pass, is the crease they call the Continental Divide. Any river that starts to the east of that point flows into the Atlantic and any that starts to the west heads downhill, all the way to the Pacific. To the Pacific and to home, my friends, is where we are heading. This is it. Just like when you push your snowboard over the edge of the drop, you have no choice but to go where gravity takes you.

Now, I know that having a little red Santa Fe with a V6 engine means we can defy the laws of gravity and, if the truth be told, we have used it to do so in order to visit the best of New Mexico, but the fact still stands that we can not defy the pull home. It is inevitable we will be home sooner rather than later. The closer we get, the more momentum we have and the faster we’ll arrive. As I sat there on top of that mountain, posing for a self-timer picture, I realized that every crappy picture I take from now counts double, every stop is to be savored and each mile is more important than the last. Of course, each of the 54,124 miles we’ve travelled so far has been important but these last 1400 are special because they represent all the ones that came before it. The USA is as fantastic a place to travel around as any of the other countries we’ve visited. It’s ironic that this country holds a position of responsibility to our trip in the same manner in which it does to the rest of the world. But equally so, we must make sure the lure of a long left home doesn’t taint what it can offer. If anything, these last two weeks will cement the success of the whole trip. If we come out of this smiling we will have beaten the odds, silenced the naysayers yet proven nothing to anybody but ourselves because we having nothing to prove to anybody but ourselves. In Dutch, the restaurant bill is called the ‘rekoning’, so here the continental divide is the crease by which we can flip over our reckoning. Enjoy the ride downhill, we may never do this again.

(We’ll probably do this again)

If I were a twenty year old rock’n'roll star who was about to die in a tragic airplane crash somewhere in the middle of a corn field, I think I would choose Iowa in which to do it. Clear Lake, Iowa is famous more for a tragic day in February 1959 than it is anything else including the lake regardless of how clear it happens to be. I’m a bit of a Buddy Holly nut. I’m not sure why, I’m not sure it even matters why. I just am. You can ask two of my friends: Amber and Amy. Amber was born in Iowa and not too far from Clear Lake and Amy comes from Lubbock, Texas, the birthplace of the great bespectacled one. Within seconds of befriending them both nearly (and separately) eleven years ago I pounced on them with questions and trivia about their prodigal son. And so, with great enthusiasm, we met with our good pals Amber and Chadwick in Minneapolis with the idea to head south, to Iowa, to Amber’s family farm and, most importantly, via Clear Lake and the Surf Ballroom.

This isn’t really a post about Buddy Holly; you don’t know that yet but you do need a little background info so I’ll keep pretending it is. Buddy Holly, Richie Vallens and The Big Bopper played their last show ever at the Surf Ballroom on February 2nd 1959. The heating on the tour bus was broken and several musicians were reporting frost-bitten fingers. Holly decided to charter a plane to fly him and a couple of band members to the next show in Fargo. The guitar player lost a coin toss to Richie Vallens and Buddy’s bass player (Waylon Jennings) gave up his seat to an already sick Big Bopper. The plane left Clear Lake in the early hours of the 3rd but quickly crashed in white-out conditions in a corn field a few miles out of town. That was, I believe, “the day the music died” (now try getting that song out of your head).

But, as I said, this isn’t about Buddy – he is just the catalyst that led me to discover heritage, hospitality and the heartland.

Heritage is something the Americans try to preserve only after they’ve already destroyed it. Unlike the Europeans, although it could be fairly said they understand it more by accident than design, however it’s the design that helps them out. i.e. every great European leader believes their empire will last forever so designs and builds structures that can quite literally last forever. This is not how the Americans build empires. Forever squarely stands in the way of progress and progress is the engine behind the economy and the economy is what is supposed to make the poor rich but only seems to make the rich richer. Nothing in the US is built to last because nobody wants it to. And so, this brings me on to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa whose saviour, its patron saint, is this 20 year old nerd of a musician who happened to meet his untimely end a few hours after playing one of thousands of shows the venue had already seen. During the 1920’s to the 1950’s the US was full of these provincial entertainment venues. The list of people who played the Surf is as famous as those who played Carnegie Hall, The Apollo and The Grand Old Opry combined. But then, so was the artist list for every other ballroom in the country, it was a matter of geography. Before the age of air travel, musicians toured by slow bus and if a chance to earn money en-route between big cities was there, then they would take it. Almost all of those ballrooms were pulled down to make way for progress when the airplanes began to fly over the Clear Lakes, Fargos and Rapid Cities of the mid-west. Had Buddy not died that night, the Surf Ballroom would just be a footnote of a footnote, pulled down long ago. But, people love Buddy and the people of Clear Lake love people who love Buddy. Never before have I seen hugs and handshakes from a venue manager to his visitors. A genuinely warm greeting filled with honesty and integrity. We were given the tour, shown the movie and when I expressed admiration of a piece of art on the wall, our host ran to his office to look up the telephone number of the local artist who drew it. All for free, bar the voluntary contribution we gave them to help keep the doors open. If it wasn’t for this unremarkable building with a remarkable past then Clear Lake itself would have had no reason to pull up its socks and open its arms to curio-tourists like ourselves. We went to their locals’ only bowling lanes for a Bud, the locals’ only Half Moon restaurant for dinner and the next morning to their little coffee shop with horse saddles for seats – everywhere people were warm, polite and genuine. Heritage only comes alive with hospitality otherwise you’re just looking at a cold, old building.

The next morning we got in the car and drove the five miles out of town and walked the half mile or so through a corn field to find the precise point that Buddy bit the dust (or snow in this case). The spot may only be marked by a simple memorial but it’s been lovingly adorned by the fans. I love the way pop music moves people to write on the walls of Abbey Road studios or leave mementos at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, or, in this case, cover Buddy’s marker with plastic toy cars and other 50’s memorabilia. Buddy lost his trademark glasses in the crash but he can still see thanks to the thoughtfulness of one fan who brought an extra pair, just like the originals, and placed them on the marker. As an aside, the original glasses were re-discovered just last year, they’d been lost in storage at the coroner’s office since 1959 and are now back with his widow.

Speaking of corn and cornfields, our next stop was Amber’s family’s farm(s). But first, we had to stop by Grandma D’s (Amber’s favorite grandparent) for dinner. Grandma D is nearly 80, she has a working vintage pinball table in her basement, can tell you the price of an acre of farmland or a bushel of corn and will whoop your ass at cards given half the chance. (Actually, I won the game we played but I think she let me win, those Iowan manners wouldn’t let her do otherwise). Home cooking country style – lots of fresh farm produce and butter. All of Amber’s family farm for a living including her Uncle Ron who gave us a ride on the biggest tractor I have seen in my life. It has four wheels in the front and four even larger ones at the back all driven by 18 gears and controlled by a computer. He’s pretty proud of it. I might get one when we return to Seattle – it’s certainly a head turner and a snap to park but only when you own three thousand acres. Iowa farms produce mostly corn and soybeans. I was curious to debunk the myths us city folk have of modern farming so I peppered Ron(ster) with questions. Here’s some interesting factoids to ponder over when you next pour a bowl of cereal. The tree-hugging hippies would like you to believe that most corn/soy production in the US is going to bio-fuels which are under fire for not being as efficient as we think. According to Ron, most actually goes to livestock feed. That feed makes our pigs, cattle and chicken plump, juicy and ready for the BBQ. A acre of crop grow-able farmland is now priced at a record $6700. That doesn’t sound a lot but an acre of land to a farmer is equivalent to a window-box to us urban-dwellers. You can’t graze more than two cows per acre out here. A bag of corn seed is now $300, another record high. A farmer can sell a bushel of corn for about $5. It weighs about 56lbs. Your box of cornflakes weighs about a pound and costs about $3 from the supermarket – that means that somewhere between Kelloggs buying a bushel from Uncle Ron and me spooning it into my mouth that corn has gone from 8.9 cents to $3 per pound. Oh – and one more fact: pigs really really smell bad!

Iowa has to thank Buddy Holly somewhat and so do I. Without him, Iowa would have been just another flat state on the way back west. Now I have a bunch of great memories from the most unlikeliest of places.

(If you like Buddy Holly or are just simply bemused as to why a young English lad like myself does, stay tuned for the report of our trip that was hours out of our way to see the little recording studio where the magic was made)